Chapter 12: The Provisional Vote

The conference room on the forty-first floor of Stark Industries had floor-to-ceiling windows looking west over the Hudson, which Tony had arranged deliberately, because he found that people argued better when they could see something larger than themselves going wrong at a distance.

He had arranged other things as well. The chairs were ergonomically variable — three different heights available without obvious modification, which meant nobody had to ask for anything and nobody started the meeting already aggrieved by furniture. The coffee was from the machine on the executive floor rather than the one in the break room, which Carol would recognize and Tony would not acknowledge and Hill would note with the same expression she used for everything else. There was water. There were no pastries, because Tony had made the professional assessment that pastries introduced a class of interpersonal debt that complicated formal proceedings, and also he had eaten all of them in the elevator.

FRIDAY had timestamped the meeting agenda at 9:00 AM. It was now 9:04, and Hill was not yet seated.